MZS wrote:Big Game Ez-On Basic Safety Harness is a good bet for both low price and quality. It is on my Amazon Wish List and I will be getting it for my son.

Depends on the stand. If you are only 6 ft up, a harness is really a bit silly. 12 ft up on a large platform and rails it is borderline. 16 ft up on a typical inexpensive ladder stand and I think you want a harness. A climber or hang on with no harness seems very risky. And you want a harness, not a rope, if the stand should somehow come down. Seems you might also want a climbing system too for your hang on if it is up at any height.

When moving my ladder stand I unexpectantly jumped down from the 4ft rung - that was enough to mess up my knee for over a year!

These are from the osha website: "But let us move beyond the statistics. Let me tell you about some real people who were killed in falls of less than ten feet. On December 1, 1992, in Towanda, Pennsylvania, a 46 year-old roofing foreman was mopping hot tar on a roof so that another employee could apply four-by-four sheets of insulation. The foreman was situated near an unguarded edge of the roof, and was not wearing a safety belt and lanyard.

As he pushed away the hot tar kettle and turned around to retrieve a piece of insulation, his right foot stepped off the edge. He fell 7 to 10 feet, bounced off horizontal pipes and onto a concrete ramp near ground elevation. A helicopter transported him to a hospital, where he died the next day.

In California, on September 3, 1992, an inexperienced 34 year-old roofing contractor assigned to do ground work brought a hammer to a co-worker on a bare plywood roof. On the roof, his "street-type" shoes slipped out from under him. He slid down the roof and fell 9 feet to the pavement. He suffered a severe concussion and hematoma and died three days later.

On August 1, 1990, in Kaneohe, Hawaii, a 56 year-old employee climbed onto a roof where a re-roofing job was in progress. The employee managed to maneuver around one unbarricaded opening near a skylight; however, he tumbled through another opening which was covered only with tarpaper. The worker fell 9 feet to his death.

All of these incidents could have been prevented with simple, cost-effective precautions such as those required by the revised fall protection standard."These are of course work place injuries or deaths, but the message is clear, ANY fall can be dangerous. If I remember my injury stats correctly, a fall from 6 foot or above runs a %51 chance of a broken back. (but I believe these stats are over concrete, but I could be mistaken.i have been in construction for roughly 35years, and a hunter about at least 40 years. Over the years, I have seen some nasty wounds caused by falls, in the woods, and on the job. Wear the harness. A bad fall is no laughing matter.

The only real difference between a good tracker and a bad tracker is observation. All the same data is present for both. The rest is understanding what you are seeing.

Even though I walked away from it, it was a month before I felt right. I had all my innards dashed around. It was like I'd been in an auto accident. As I remember, I spent most of the next three days in bed.

Now, I was lucky. I had a buddy out in Texas that did not check out his stand too well before season, climbed up in it and suddenly noticed the world was upside down. He broke his back, and he's never been right since